Blog

This isn't a post about interactive magic. It's just a question that I'd like you to consider until my next post.

(But speaking of interactive magic, one of you has to be friends with David Copperfield, right? Can you get him to do this for me? What I want is to get him to re-record this trick. He doesn't need to get James Earl Jones, he can use Steve Harvey or something. Or no one, for that matter. You see, I had this idea that I would start up one of his old specials to watch with a friend. And when he gets to the interactive trick and he's like, "Come up to the screen so you can touch my finger," I would rush up to the screen, unzip my pants, and put my dick on his finger while looking over my shoulder at my friend and braying like a jackass. Then I want Copperfield to say, "Andy, get your little dick off the screen you stupid animal." And I would just freeze, and swallow hard, and shamefully zip up my pants while, on screen, David gets back to the trick. You see? And I would just cut that into the special where the original version appeared. It would make David look great -- well, at least to my one friend. And you might think, "Well, she'll just know you used some connections to get him to re-record it. It might be funny, but it wouldn't be magical or anything." But I think you're wrong. Here's the thing, my anonymity goes both ways. My non-magic friends don't know I have this site. The don't know I have "connections." So the idea that somehow I could have finagled Copperfield into making a dick joke for the sake of one of my friends isn't even feasible. Oh, and I have a way to make it look like we're watching video from an old VHS but we're really watching something I'm playing from my computer. So at the end we could re-watch the actual tape and all would be as it was in the original broadcast. And I'd turn to her and ask, "That did happen right. We didn't imagine that. And how did he know my dick was so little?")

Oh, right, the question I'd like you to consider... Here's a trick that recently came out called Liberty Vanish.

Back in the days when I didn't have a magic blog empire to run, I would ask my friends to give me their shitty tricks they bought and I'd try and come up with a way to use them. It was just an exercise to try and keep my magic-mind sharp. This morphed into my "friends" emailing me links and saying, "So, do you think there's anything worthwhile you can do with this?" They didn't buy the product in the first place. Now they were just looking for free consultation without even investing in the trick itself. Leeches.

Anyway, one of them asked if I had any ideas for this trick. He likes the visual, but recognizes that this is, what I call, a half trick. A full trick would be: you vanish the statue of liberty and let them see the postcard to verify it's really gone. Examination -- in the context of a trick like this -- is not optional. Examination is the only confirmation that the trick has happened. What I mean is, without examination the trick is "It looks like the Statue of Liberty vanished." With examination it's, "The Statue of Liberty vanished from this card." That might not be how they articulate it, but that's the level of conviction they would be able to have in the effect.

Regardless of that, I'm asking you now what my friend asked of me: Do you have any ideas for this effect? Maybe a context that might make it something more than it is? Can we use that visual moment in some other fashion? I don't actually want to hear your ideas at this point. For now I just think it's a good exercise to think of these things. I'm going to think on it too and tomorrow I'll let you know if I come up with anything.